Reasonable storage cap for users?

How much space for free?

[jhmedia]

I’m developing a social media site that will allow users to upload video, audio, photos and text. Membership is free and provides a certain MB allotment of storage. Uploads will remain on the site permanently to create an archive. My question is, what is a reasonable storage limit for a small startup? 100 - 200 MB? For $20 per year, premium members will get another X amount of storage per year. Again, I’m wondering what’s reasonable.

Any recommendations are much appreciated!

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Per user or for the whole site?

[shigamoto]

If you mean per user you will have to take into account how much the extra space costs you and then slap some profit on to it.

Videos especially will require lots of room and bandwidth, so maybe you should have some sort of upload limit instead?

[vincevincevince]

It is a very difficult model if you insist on permenant storage for free accounts. I think you need to get colo and cram as many drive as possible into your box... storage is going to be a serious load for you. 100-200Mb is really small for video uploads, you really need around 2Gb each.

Perhaps have it limited by download use as well - 10Gb download per user per month, after that they nee to pay?

[jhmedia]

Thanks for the responses and the welcome. To answer lorax, I'm trying to come up with a reasonable limit per user. Given the subject matter of the site -- history -- I'm expecting most posts to be text and photos rather than videos.

[lorax]

Ok. So why not pick a reasonable number for images (say 50MB for now) and then offer that video and audio files can be done by request (ie. give you a chance to speak with the user about what they intend to do and how much they would like to upload)? Then after 3-6 months or possibly a year you should have a feel for just how much space the average user will need and then you can set your limits.